


Guilty Ghost

by Twitchiest



Series: Apocalypse Girl [11]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Dark, Depression, F/M, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Post-Apocalypse, Present Tense, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-20
Updated: 2015-08-20
Packaged: 2018-04-16 08:38:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4618809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twitchiest/pseuds/Twitchiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are better days, and worse days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guilty Ghost

_**One**_  
  
Every morning Leander wakes up and washes in front of a tarnished mirror. Helena's already gone. If he looks, he'll find Bay gone, too.  
  
He eats a late breakfast then checks the books, made of black leather and rough paper somewhere east of Manor. Every other day One joins him and they go over the maps. If Bay's in, she always helps. It's not her favourite job. She's a dutiful girl.  
  
Unless there are issues, it doesn't take longer than ten minutes. Not that they have a working clock to time him by.  
  
It's a life. Life is worth living.  
  
_**Two**_  
  
When he was younger, he went searching for himself on adventure holidays, bars, and girls. He only found trouble and the resistance.  
  
Young men have the energy to overthrow governments.  
  
  It took seeing her there, in front of a wall of screens, to find himself. He should have known she was trouble when they met.Her name is Helena. He could only have mistaken her for innocent.  
  
That's not fair to either of them. He wasn't Paris. She isn't Hero.  
  
She tore their myths open and rebuilt them out of his blood, her hatred, and the ashes of the world.  
  
_**Three**_  
  
After he checks the books, he circles the perimeter. It's maintained by a stone wall. They built the wall ten years ago, some six foot high, to deter a band of robbers forced north by floods. Since then it's been little more than warm comfort.  
  
No one threatens Manor now. Manor is a pin holding a vast network together, strong within and without. Their holdings expand every other year as yet another community petitions to join them.  
  
This is his Helena. She is building something great. They are little more than tools to her, though she may regard them fondly.  
  
_**Four**_  
  
It's all his fault.  
  
He assumed the bomb would work, no one would be able to track its source, and that she would be safe.  
  
Helena was nothing more than a pretty co-worker, back then.  
  
When it failed, he ran, knowing she'd give up his identity to save herself. She wasn't resistance. She barely knew the resistance existed.  
  
He checked the records, later. After. They hadn't bothered to interrogate her for more than a few hours before they locked her in isolation.  
  
His fault. He thought honest innocence and a pretty face were good defence, against even a corrupt government.  
  
_**Five**_  
  
Three keeps the big house, and Leander checks in on him. They have thirty people who need special care. Ten are old. The youngest of that set is eighty. Another three can't see well enough to be of use outside. One is deaf. Six are so traumatised by the bombs twenty years gone that the outside world makes them worse. The rest have chronic illnesses, or mental health issues no one can treat.  
  
Someimes he sees Helena talking to them. She's kind to them. She doesn't smile but she speaks in a voice soft and even, and touches them gently.  
  
_**Six**_  
  
He didn't know her when he saw her. Pretty Helena had been lost to a sharp-featured woman. They called her Carver, in the Pit, if they had to name her at all.  
  
Not until she broke did he see Helena, and in that she was the breaking of him. She was the consequences of what he'd done, an innocent lost to darkness, killing to survive. He put everything he had into making this right, not sure if he ever could.  
  
Still so blind, he didn't feel the hatred inside her, beating a drum stronger than her pulse. He saw hope.  
  
_**Seven**_  
  
He goes back out into the sun. Today they've got soup going in the kitchen, and fresh bread. He steals a roll on his way out.

Nine is in charge of maintenance. Leander finds nothing amiss there, or at the smithy. Six and Seven run the farm, and they have a list of supplies they'll need by harvest. He runs it over to Two over in the radio room, under the broadcast tower. Two has a boy who's radioing someone with a warm, patient voice in Dedham, as practise.  
  
They're all finding their replacements, these days. No one lives forever.  
  
_**Eight**_  
  
The resistance came for him twice.  
  
The first time, half a dozen died under the guard's guns. The second, they rescued a bloody, beaten man from the Pit and brought him back from the dead.  
  
Helena took another name, in this time. He heard it sometimes. If he'd known the people around him were talking about her, he'd have warned them.  
  
He thought he was going to save her, but she broke him. His right leg still aches in the cold.  
  
He thought he was the hero, but laying in a bed in a resistance safehouse, he wasn't saving anyone.  
  
_**Nine**_  
  
The sun's at its peak by the time he's done, so he's got half a day left and nothing to do. Leander checks in with the gate guards for an hour's talk. They know what he needs to hear about, and they'll tell him it under the guise of bored, friendly humour.  
  
With nothing else to do he takes up a lunch duty, dispensing as much as anyone can eat. He eats with the kitchen staff after, feet up and gossiping with the rest. The soup is ham, carrot, and mint, and the bread soft and light as a cloud.  
  
_**Ten**_  
  
He didn't look for Helena. He hadn't thought to. He only wanted to get better and fight, and by the time he was, there were riots in the street and he knew.  
  
He remembered secrets foolishly whispered in the dark, to a woman he'd hurt, to the monster he'd made, and he knew.  
  
An invisible cord pulled taut and drew him back to the place they'd worked, once, to a building silent and empty, down into echoing shadows to a room he knew was there but had never seen.  
  
His feet dragged on the ground every step of the way.  
  
_**Eleven**_  
  
He joins in the afternoon school session. They have fourteen students at the moment, some to come, some to move on.  
  
Education is important. He's the one who put together the resources to build the little school building, found the books, and traded for supplies, but it's Eleven who found a passion in teaching. He appears sometimes and helps out. Today he tells them myths his parents told him. He tells them about Leander and Hero, and Helena and Paris, and others.  
  
Eleven tries to talk to him after, but he deflects worry with a joke, and the moment passes.  
  
_**Twelve**_  
  
He should have shot her.  
  
How could he have shot her?  
  
She smiled up at him and it looked so real. Felt real, when they kissed. Felt real, under him.  
  
He should have shot her. Should never have let her leave the building, but she presented vulnerability, submission, and he couldn't kill that.  
  
She used him and left him for dead, and then she used him again. He knew her, knew what she was doing, and he fell for it all over again, opened himself up to her and let her own him.  
  
Is it any wonder that he wept?  
  
_**Thirteen**_  
  
Just before dinner he visits a family in the throng of little houses. The father works on their trade caravan, leaving his wife alone with their miraculous eight year old twins and a baby girl. It's a check up, nothing special. He doesn't want people to slip through the cracks. By the time he leaves he's planning a nursery in his head. They have room for one, but it'll take some talking to get it past the rest of the council.  
  
It'll be his, with assistants to take over when he's busy. He needs to do something with his time.  
  
_**Fourteen**_  
  
There are long months between the End and finding Helena's loyal twelve again. Half or most of a year. It blurs into hurting haze. Sometimes he wonders if she wasn't as lost. He's never known her without a goal to work towards, even before the Pit.  
  
He clawed his way out of the darkness, but it's still there. Waiting for him.  
  
He remembers the last hot bath he took, in a five star hotel with miraculous power months after the End. He scrubbed himself, raw and clean, then poured in a bottle of bubble bath and played in the foam.  
  
_**Fifteen**_  
  
After dinner a band of drums and strings picks up. It's not planned, but it's welcome. He sings along with the rest, drinking watered down berry wine, a voice in a crowd. He lets himself absorb honest joy until it pours out of his skin, and no one casts him a worried glance.  
  
They've built something good here. It matters. It has to.  
  
He stumbles back to bed and finds Helena there, damp from washing, dusty clothes in the basket. She lets him curl around her and kiss her shoulders, and listens to his day.  
  
She owns him, utterly, completely.  
  
_**Sixteen**_  
  
Sometimes he thinks the best thing he's got is Bay.  
  
Orphaned young, sweet but a little strange, he spent as much time with her as he could. She's the child he'll never have. It hurt to let her find her way. Hurt when she came back.  
  
In the empty city nights he slipped back to that building, to that room, and smashed the screens and computers. Evidence gone forever.  
  
Twelve people have an idea of what happened. Two know the certainties. None will tell.  
  
Bay brightens his world in a way no one else can, and so he is happy.  
  
_**Seventeen**_  
  
There are better days, and worse days.

He and Helena are tangled in each other, bound by possession, blood, and guilt. He made her. She made herself. She made him.  
  
Was it her fault or his, everyone's or no one's? Only the future could judge. Neither of them would live to make their case, meet their jury of peers, hear their sentence, serve their time.  
  
She sleeps in his arms, vulnerable, and he cannot kill that, so he sleeps with her.  
  
When he wakes she's gone, but their bed is warm. She hasn't gone far.  
  
He gets up and washes.


End file.
